The New York Art Residency & Studios (NARS) Foundation is pleased to announce the annual Studio Artist exhibition, a showcase of the diverse community of artists working and creating at NARS year round. Aglae Bassen’s painting lends the exhibition its title and thematic principle. The question of how to orient and locate oneself in relation to space, the other, natural and social phenomena is foregrounded in many of the works. The studio, one’s painting practice and processes, and art as self-expression and “bearing witness” are positions to be explored and staked out. The very light of Sunset Park temporally locates Ioana Manolache’s work in her studio, even as they don’t refer to anything but the conditions of their making and the status of painting. Gus Wheeler’s paintings of fans and their placement in the gallery are meant to disorient and dislocate with their overwhelming familiarity. On the other end, global warming and environmental crises locate Elena Soterakis’ paintings in the here and now. There may not be a map or instructions for our way out of the dystopic future they depict.

NARS Spotlight is proud to present Yi Xin Tong's solo exhibition "NYC Fishing Trip," opening August 4th and up through September 1, 2017.

Yi Xin Tong is a New York-based artist and amateur fisherman who enthusiastically steals his own studio time for fishing, which brings him to the remote peripheries of the city where ruins replace buildings and nature’s reclamation is surprisingly ubiquitous. Besides the new perspectives gained on the social geography of New York, fresh bluefish and striped bass occasionally appear on his dinner table. On the edge of the ocean as well as on YouTube, Tong’s endeavor is for the most part anti-productive; however, the salutations from his peer fishing channel hosts linger in his ears, “Tight lines. See you next time.”

NARS is pleased to announce Mira Dayal as the recipient of the 2017 Juried Solo Exhibition, selected by guest juror Tom McGlynn.

Material Metaphors focuses on hair as a language and material with which to elicit, translate, and confront contemporary political affects. Architectural and performative, the installation employs marketing tropes and displays as modes of consuming and fetishizing hair. A series of photographs looks further into embodied and cultural forms of hair and its residues, in abstracted, ambiguous, and homologous representations. Together with a selection of prints made with real and artificial hair, these works engage with sources of repulsion, attraction, distrust, and narcissism.

Gathered from the artist, other artists, friends, and mentors, the hair that is used in each work comes to represent a collective body, which will be involved in a performance accompanying the exhibition.

The exhibition showcases the diverse research interests, materials, processes, and presentation modes that underlie the art practices the artists in residence have continued to explore and develop alongside each other, over the course of three to six months in South Brooklyn.

Ololade Adeniyi’s Eden 2.0 (Ongoing) is a reoccurring series of surveillance videos that depict a surreal utopia saturated with fragments of a world infiltrated and influenced by operations of desire. The videos hint at a fourth dimension of conversation, with the taste of hypnotic looping, undulating and cascading walls on the tip of ones tongue, they directly confront the blurred relationship between reality and fantasy; therefore ultimately suggesting that a personal perception of the future amongst minority groups could be a result of the fusion with the very machines originally used to create repression.

In Bat-Ami Rivlin’s sculptures found objects, such as corporate plaza ashtrays or more household materials are re-purposed and rendered unrecognizable as they are combined to form new objects that not only have a body and sense of their own but seem to also suggest the human body and its functions.

Somewhere between photography and painting, Jesus Benavente’s prints on latex embody the process and materiality of the images. Text scribbled on balloons, once deflated and scanned, retains its textual quality, even legibility, but also becomes the site of an event.

Jahyun Seo's work explores the process and transference between analog and digital media. Her work, influenced by her training and background in textiles, is the result of a meticulous layering of tape and paint to create a composition and form that is often, later, digitally manipulated to generate new images.

Nooshin Rostami’s abstract drawings take simple geometric forms as their starting point and through repetition, size, and transparency achieve movement, rhythm and space that bears resemblance to different landscapes: a wavy ocean, rolling hills, mountains, nomadic tents, and so forth.

Sean Campbell’s installation 4-Year-Olds Don’t Act Like Trump (Wall: Prototype VII + VIII) uses Legos as medium to spark a sense of interactivity with the built environment and to reference a confluence of
political, social, and technological factors in the construction of identity and sense of place. For this installation he used a site specific research process to identify markers of local geographical identity, such as a 3-d printed tree stump scanned precisely from one found in Sunset Park.

Buzz Slutzky’s drawings juxtapose images from two disparate and distant sources: a 70's self-defense manual -- Looking Forward to Being Attacked: Self-protection for Every Woman, written by an ex-police officer of the Memphis Police Department -- and TV commercials from the same era. The manual’s textual and visual language is not unlike that of advertising, which often delivers products with a dose of self-empowerment. Extracted from their original context and intersected with advertising images to comedic effect, the power dynamics are nevertheless present, if not thrown into sharp relief.

Bonnie Lane’s self-titled text piece is a compilation of quotes from a variety of sources, including academic, professional, medical, familial, and romantic. These quotes are stitched into a textual collage which constitutes a satirical biography exposing the pervasiveness of criticisms and misrepresentation in all facets of the artist’s life. The piece questions its own authenticity and stimulates questions of representation, shame, morality, power dynamics, fiction, and autobiography.

Ju Ae Park, in a departure from the landscape of Jeju Island that has defined her painting practice, explores her new surroundings and experience in New York through personal, if anecdotal, episodes, objects, and characters that are at once lived, imaginary and surreal. This new series of works, while thematically about her first trip to the West, draws heavily from Chinese and Korean painting traditions, spatial quality, and imagery.

Baris Gokturk’s ‘Untitled (The Kozmonaut),’ an installation with a free standing sculpture and a 2d wall-hanging element, inserts the viewer into a tenuous relationality with both the militaristic figures in the photo and the amorphous mass on the table. The piece implicates the viewer in a cryptic involvement in some undetermined event, creating a sense of in-betweenness in time, place, and context. While the parenthetical title gives hint to the contents of the unnamed mass, the historical and political implications remain unexplained and ask for further investigation.